Ladies and Gentlemen, the Low Countries Developed Into a Major

Ladies and gentlemen, The Low Countries developed into a major junction for international goods from the twelfth century on, because of their central location. Its inhabitants drew on their knowledge and artistic creativity to generate revenue. Indeed, this was essential, because the soil of the polders contained no valuable ores or minerals. They made tapestries out of the wool they imported. Miniaturists passed on their knowledge and skills to the next generations. Panel painters began to use linseed oil instead of using egg-yolk as a binding medium, which created a substance that dried more slowly and offered the advantage of being easier to work. From then on, painters could render shades of light and dark more convincingly and found renewed pleasure in depicting the visible world – the reflection of a window in an eye, the tactility of fur, a fly on a flower. Portraits had never appeared so real. This technical revolution in painting was soon recognized throughout Europe. Paintings from the Low Countries stood for quality and were exported from on the beginning. Van Eyck, Van der Weyden, Van der Goes, Bouts, Memling and David had clients in Florence, Venice, Genoa, Barcelona, Valencia and Lisbon. Their work was copied on a massive scale. In addition to existing art intended for church and nobility, a new market developed for the middle classes. New genres emerged, such as landscapes, interiors and still lifes. Many artists dedicated themselves to producing scenes that were partial to everyday and anecdotal subject matter. These characteristics are typical for Flemish and Dutch art from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. Inevitably, this successful style soon made others jealous. Those who saw Greek and Roman culture as paramount dismissed Northern art as anti-intellectual, as the painters from the Netherlands had not based their art upon the rules and aesthetics of antiquity. It may seem inappropriate to mention to such criticisms during a conference that celebrates Netherlandish art, but these remarks tell us a great deal about painting in the Low Countries. For the sake of this audience, I have reduced an art- theoretical lecture into three telling quotations. Michelangelo is supposed to have said that: “In Flanders, they paint with a view to external exactness or such things as may cheer you and of which you cannot speak ill, as for example saints and prophets. They paint stuffs and masonry, the green grass of the fields, the shadow of trees, and rivers and bridges, which they call landscapes […] And all this, though it pleases some people, is done without reason or art, without symmetry or proportion, without skillful judgment or boldness, and, finally, without substance or vigor.” And to divert the taste of his readers from Northern to Italian art, Francisco de Holanda, who actually wrote this, cunningly added that art from the Netherlands only appeals “to women, especially to the very old and the very young, and also to monks and nuns and to certain noblemen with no sense of true harmony.” I also want to share a passage from the twelfth Discourse that Sir Joshua Reynolds delivered to his young students at the Royal Academy in 1763. In it, he deals with the perception that Dutch painting reflects Nature. “The terms beauty or nature, which are general ideas, are but different modes of expressing the same thing,” he says, “whether we apply these terms to statues, poetry, or picture. Deformity is not nature, but an accidental deviation from her accustomed practice. This general idea therefore ought to be called Nature, and nothing else, correctly speaking, has a right to that name. But we are so far from speaking, in common conversation, with any such accuracy, that, on the contrary, when we criticize Rembrandt and other Dutch painters, who introduced into their historical pictures exact representations of individual objects with all their imperfections, we say, - though it is not in good taste, yet it is nature. This misapplication of terms must be often perplexing to the young student. Is not art, he may say, an imitation of nature? Must he not therefore who imitates her with the greatest fidelity, be the best artist? By this mode of reasoning Rembrandt has a higher place than Rafaelle. But a very little reflection will serve to show us that these particularities cannot be nature: for how can that be the nature of man, in which no two individuals are the same.” Eugène Delacroix also made note of the Flemish and Dutch inclination towards imitation in his Journal. “Flemish artists who are so admirable in family scenes […] have echoed these in their mythological, historical, heroic and poetical works. They cover simple Flemish people, painted from nature, in draperies and mythological accessories and paint them as faithfully as they would do while rendering a brothel scene. The results are variously bizarre and turn a Jupiter and a Venus into citizens of Bruges or Antwerp in travesty.” Strangely enough, Delacroix thought Rubens was an exception to this rule. But aren’t Rubens’s quivering mythological nudes also inspired by a desire to turn antique statues into living creatures? By the challenge of making goddesses look real? 2 Flemish and Dutch art has much in common and cannot be separated as easily as nationalist art historians of the nineteenth-century tried to do. Invention travelled then, as it does now, if perhaps a bit more slowly. Condemned for being sentimental and ill-conceived, without harmony, looked upon with contempt because of the vulgarity or ugliness of the models, the art of the Low Countries was – and still is – mainly praised for its unparalleled illusionism and frequently outspoken and unvarnished naturalism. It rejoices in observation. Love for Dutch and Flemish art is certainly alive and kicking among museum visitors and art collectors today. As proof, we have invited four distinguished collectors, who will be interviewed by Rudi Ekkart in the concluding session of this symposium. We are honored to welcome George Abrams, George Kremer, Thomas Leysen and Marieke Sanders. But the international taste for the art of the Low Countries was established by a relatively small number of connoisseurs in past centuries. Aristocrats, politicians, businessmen, writers and art historians were eager to pay homage to the exceptional artistic talents of the past. The catholic Habsburgs, Bourbons and Stuarts, the protestant Oranges and the orthodox Romanovs had a particular love of Baroque Flemish and Dutch history paintings with grand gestures. They saw these compositions primarily as visual tools that could glorify absolutism or as suitable decoration for their palaces. For this reason, imperial and royal dynasties throughout Europe commissioned, bought, inherited and accumulated many hundreds of history paintings. This also explains the presence of more than one hundred works by Rubens and his studio in the Prado alone. (Alejandro Vergara will shed light on the collections of the Spanish kings during his lecture tomorrow.) In 1656, Leopold Wilhelm of Austria, governor of the Southern Netherlands, took his famous collection of Flemish masters to Vienna, where he retired. Four years later, the Antwerp artist and court painter David Teniers published the Theatrum Pictorium, the first illustrated printed catalogue of a major paintings collection. This opulent book contained etchings that reproduced 243 paintings, which now form the nucleus of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. In 1698 Maximilian Emanuel of Bavaria, another governor of the Southern Netherlands, purchased 101 paintings from the Antwerp art dealer Gisbert van Colen, works that can still be seen in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. 3 In the early 1700s, banker and connoisseur Pierre Crozat, one of the foremost drawings collectors of his time, acted as buying agent for Philippe, duke of Orléans. The French regent’s acquisitions were shown in his palace in the center of Paris, today the Palais Royal. It contained some 500 paintings, including famous Italian pictures by Raphael, Correggio, Titian and Veronese. Dutch and Flemish works were displayed in smaller rooms with rich furniture, porcelain and boiseries. The Flemish works were dominated by Rubens, with 19 paintings, including a group of 12 oil sketches, van Dyck with 10 works and David Teniers with 9. The Dutch paintings included 6 Rembrandts, 7 works by Caspar Netscher and 3 by Frans van Mieris. There were 3 Gerrit Dous and 4 Wouwermans. The rooms had been rearranged to accommodate the paintings and connoisseurs were particularly taken by the Galerie à la Lanterne, with its even, sunless top light diffused from the cupola overhead. The collection was accessible to the public for most of the 18th century, aided by the printed catalogue of 1727, republished ten years later. The Northern paintings in the Palais Royal collection were a prime source of inspiration for French artists such as Watteau, Fragonard and de La Fosse. The collection was sold off by the bankrupt Philippe-Egalité in 1788. Parisians deeply regretted the dispersal of these masterpieces, which ended up mainly in English collections. On the other side of the channel, at around the same time, an important collection of Dutch and Flemish works was assembled by England’s first prime minister Sir Robert Walpole. I only mention him briefly, because his activities will be dealt with later today in Irina Sokolova’ lecture. And tomorrow, Elinoor Bergvelt will focus on King of Poland Stanislaw Poniatowski’s frustrated ambitions to form a collection. Taste for smaller Dutch and Flemish genre paintings, especially for Leiden fine painters, increased notably in the first half of the eighteenth century. One of the best collections was formed by Augustus the Strong and his son Augustus III, electors of Saxony and Kings of Poland. They collected paintings of the highest quality in vast quantities, regardless of subject-matter or country of origin.

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